Category: Random, But Interesting

Our industry loves a rashomon, and in the past year or two, our collective subject of debate has been Uber. Perhaps the fastest growing company in history (its numbers aren’t public, but we’ll get to some estimates shortly), Uber has become a vector for some of the most wide-ranging arguments I’ve ever had regarding the tech industry’s impact on society at large.

It’s not that Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft didn’t evoke great debate, but all those companies came of age in an era where tech was still relegated to a sideshow in the broader cultural conversation. Microsoft was taking over the computer industry in the 1990s, Google the Internet in the early 2000s, Facebook and Apple the mobile and social world in the late 2000s. But Uber? Uber is about a very real and entirely new approach to our economy, a stand in for the wealth divide festering in the US and beyond, an existential rorschach testing your values around the role of government, the social contract, and the kind of society we want to become.

Every year around this year I fly to Arizona and attend the IAB Annual Meeting, a confab of 1000+ executives in the interactive media business. Yes, it’s a rubber-chicken boondoggle – what ballroom-based warm-climated event in February isn’t? – but I go because I get to catch up with dozens of colleagues and friends, and I usually connect to a handful of interesting new folks as well. I hate the travel and despise most hotel rooms, but on balance, well – I keep going. (And yes, I think the NewCo model is even more productive, but more on that in another post).

I find the best connections happen over dinner or drinks – perhaps that’s my own convivial nature, but I sense I’m not alone. So I want to tell you a story of a chance meeting at a bar, because it evokes a larger lesson in business: you’re only as good as your relationships – and those relationships often exist outside traditional boundaries of time and space.

(image) I’m the father of three children, and two of them are girls. And while my first was a boy, and therefore “broke me in” with extraordinary acts of Running Headlong Into Fence Posts and Drinking Beer Stolen From Dad’s Fridge Yet Forgetting To Hide The Bottles, nothing, NOTHING, prepared me for Girls Behaving Badly To Each Other Whilst In Middle School.

Those of you with girls aged 11-14 know of what I speak: Middle school girls are just flat out BADASSES when it comes to unrepentant cruelty – and they are almost as good at forgetting, often within a day (or an hour) the rationale or cause of their petty behaviors. On one of my daughter’s wall is a note from a middle school friend. It says – and while I may paraphrase, I’m not making this up – “Hey Girl, I’m so glad we’re best friends, because I really hated you before but now we’re best friends right?!” And my daughter *pinned this* to her wall – her ACTUAL wall, in her bedroom!

Anyway, every so often girls in middle school end up squaring off – and the result is an embarrassment of small-minded but astonishingly machiavellian acts of cruelty. Little lies are let loose like sparks on a pile of hay, and soon a fire of social shunning rips through the school. Invitations are made, then retracted vigorously, and in public. Insults are veiled as compliments, and a girl’s emerging character strengths – a penchant for science perhaps, or a love of kittens for God’s sake – are expertly turned against her.

(image) I love being part of naming something. It’s probably the flat out most fun you can have legally with your clothes on – but for many folks, including entrepreneurs, it’s the source of endless consternation.

It doesn’t have to be. Here’s how I think about coming up with a name for something – a company, a new product, even a project you might be working on.

Rule #1: Don’t Overthink It. A name means nothing till those using it make it mean something.

2015. My eleventh year of making predictions. Seems everyone’s gotten onto this particular bus, and I’m now late to the party – I never get around to writing till the weekend – when I have open hours in front of me, and plenty of time to contemplate That Which May Come.

There are several keys to getting predictions right. First, you need to pay attention to long term secular trends – big changes that have been in the works for a while. Second, you need to call the timing – will those trends break into the mainstream this coming year? Last year, for example, I predicted that 2014 would be the year that the Internet would “adopt the planet as its cause.” I think I was right on the secular trend, but utterly wrong on the timing.

Third, you need to pay attention to patterns that have yet to emerge, but have a high probability of breaking out in the near term. A good example of this is my declaring that Twitter would become a major media platform three years ago.

A caveat before I think out loud, quite possibly getting myself into a running battle I know I can’t win: I’m not a public market stock investor, I’ve never been one, and take the following ruminations at the price they’re offered: IE, free.

A year or so ago Chas Edwards, a colleague, pal, and member of the founding team at Federated Media, came to my office for a catch up. I had heard he was cooking up a new venture, but I didn’t know the details.

Little did I know what Chas and his new partner Douglas McGray had up their sleeve – a new *print* magazine built specifically for California.

But…print is dead, right? Apparently not. Chas and MacGray have a thesis that California is ready for a well-written, beautifully designed print publication, and all that was standing in their way was the cost of circulation, a major impediment in today’s market. They solved that issue with a clever hack of today’s newspapers – California Sunday is distributed free inside selected California newspapers. In essence, they’re piggybacking the launch of their brand, adding a valauble new product to what is a staid and attenuated newspaper brand.

It’s rare I write about things not directly related to the Internet industry, but the film Take Me To The River, a multi-year project helmed by my friend and colleague Martin Shore, is certainly worthy of a detour. If you love music, any kind of music, this film is a must.

Martin first told me about this project more than five years ago, back then, it was going to be an album bringing together R&B legends with emerging rap artists from the Memphis area. But as he began to produce the tracks, a film emerged, one that not only tells the extraordinary musical stories, but also the story of America itself, an America that still struggles with issues of race and inequality.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to attend a NewCo till you’ve been to one, but this video, below, should certainly help. It comes right on the heels of NewCo’s SF schedule going up, which for those of you who’ve never been is like announcing the lineup at Bonnaroo for those of us in the NewCo world. In SF, companies opening their doors include Medium, Carbon Lighthouse, ACT, IFTTT, the melt, Lit Motors, Salesforce, Bloomberg, OpenTable, Scoot, NextDoor, and 100+ more.

Here’s a post announcing the schedule going live – companies fill up fast, and the only way to ensure you’ll get in is to get a VIP or Reserved ticket. But if you can’t pop for the $90 (Reserved) or $295 (VIP, including kickoff party), never fear. NewCos are always free to the public after Reserved and VIPs pick their schedules.